We each have our own grail-quests.

[truepenny]

Before I developed fiscal responsibility, I used to go bookstore trolling on a frighteningly regular basis. I am reminded of this today because digging out the David Kirby poem has induced great crashing waves of nostalgia for the days when I spent hours combing the used bookstore(s) for obscure volumes of poetry like that one and bought everything I found.

Used-bookstore-trolling is an art, and it's one I used to be extremely good at. My best-ever coups? One: in the last hour of a library sale, where they were giving the books away because otherwise they had nothing to do with them, finding a book on the particular corner of history that MH is most interested in and taking it because, hey, free, and then getting home and having his face light up because it was (a.) tremendously important and influential, (b.) out of print, and (c.) scarcer than hens' teeth. Two, when trolling for Prelims books, finding the Oxford Complete Poems of Robert Sidney (Philip's younger and much more minor brother), which see (c.) above. (Also, I have a Thing for the lesser Sidneys like Robert and his daughter Mary Wroth.) And then, of course, the day that heres_luck's dissertation director dragged me, all but physically, down to a used bookstore near campus and demanded that I buy the 4 volume complete John Webster which had been shelved with the dictionaries (Noah, John--a Webster's a Webster, right?). And another library sale, where I got the 12 volume Golden Bough for $2 a volume. I haven't read much of it, but I love having it on my bookcase where I can just look at it from time to time and purr.

An art, a passion, a vocation. Used bookstore trolling. I still have a list as long as your arm of books I'm looking for and still have a dangerous propensity to get sucked into bookstores as I pass them. But I practice better frugality now, and do not succumb to the sirens' singing. ... At least not often.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Ooh, glorious bookshore-trawl moments.

St. Patrick's Day last year. Doing what all real Irish people do on Patrick's Day, which is look at books. Wandering into an antiquarian book thing under the misapprehension that it had an affordable second-hand element.

1860s translation of Dante's Inferno into moderately good quasi-Miltonic. Footnotes dedicated to the dissing of every previous translation. Gustav Dore engravings. One hundred and eighty-three of them.

It was not sensibly priced, exactly. But I did restrain myself from both the Dali-illustrated six-volume boxed set of the Divine Comedy, or the shelf with the complete works of Darwin in first editions - that, I think, may be a present to myself should I ever become a full professor. Boith of which were an order of magnitude more.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Not so fond of the quasi-Milton (not so fond of the genuine Milton, for that matter), but Dore! Ooh! Lots of Dore! Double-ooh! *trails off into covetous mumbling*